


a once-exposed deception

by napoleonscomet



Category: Voyná i mir | War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
Genre: Classical References, Siblings, The Iliad, helen of troy parallels
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-21
Updated: 2019-03-21
Packaged: 2019-11-27 05:25:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,101
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18190337
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/napoleonscomet/pseuds/napoleonscomet
Summary: Something sparked in Helene’s chest and she set her jaw. When Hippolyte had begun his study of Homer, she had always crawled into the room and begged him to teach it to her. He had let her at his notes and papers, but she had never gotten the sense that he knew what he was talking about himself, and so he had failed to teach her anything of value. Her lips moved in the memory of the shapes the unfamiliar letters had taken, but she couldn’t put them into her own tongue beyond the first few lines. She watched her brothers discuss this tongue she didn’t know, and she tried to raise her voice in to join them, but it broke. Anatole swung at the air, and Hippolyte laughed.“I wish I were Achilles,” he crowed.





	a once-exposed deception

**Author's Note:**

> i'm writing this on a cold and rainy day of my spring break at my own home in the countryside so that's really the general vibe for the whole thing. this is what happens when i (re)read the iliad and w&p each in successive semesters...

The summer Helene was fifteen, it rained for almost two weeks straight, keeping the Kuragin children cloistered inside the house of the country estate. Their governess, just a day after the rain began, came down with a cough - “It’s the change in the weather,” she said, waving off Prince Vassily’s concern for her. “I’ll be right in a day or so.” - which developed into a cold that kept her in bed for the whole duration of the storm. The housekeeper thus was tasked with watching children, who delighted in evading her watch, hiding in crevices and creeping up into unused wings of the house and barren attics.

It was in one of these attics where they sat one afternoon on the bare floor, twelve-year-old Anatole’s head resting on his sister’s lap, her fingers carding through his over-long hair, a lantern burning in the center of their little circle to keep the chill and shadows at bay.

“Tell us the story of a book you’ve read,” she said into the silence, her gaze flitting to Hippolyte sitting across from her. Hippolyte: Back with the family for the summer before going off to university, the oldest sibling, far from the brightest or most favorite, but looked up to by his sister for the knowledge that he seemed to hold and which she envied.  
He acquiesced. “Long ago where the Ottoman Empire is now,” he narrated, “lived a young shepherd named—”

“Oh we all know this story,” cried Anatole. He leapt up, swung an imaginary sword around. “I’ve already begun to read it. I don’t want to listen to it again.”

“Have you now!” Hippolyte exclaimed. “Good for you, I don’t remember reading Greek at your age.” Something sparked in Helene’s chest and she set her jaw. When Hippolyte had begun his study of Homer, she had always crawled into the rooom and begged him to teach it to her. He had let her at his notes and papers, but she had never gotten the sense that he knew what he was talking about himself, and so he had failed to teach her anything of value. Her lips moved in the memory of the shapes the unfamiliar letters had taken, but she couldn’t put them into her own tongue beyond the first few lines. She watched her brothers discuss this tongue she didn’t know, and she tried to raise her voice in to join them, but it broke. Anatole swung at the air, and Hippolyte laughed.

“I wish I were Achilles,” he crowed. “When I grow up and join the army I’m going to fight like him.”

“Who would you fight?” Hippolyte asked.

“Whoever I want to,” Anatole said. His brother laughed.

“And so you will.”

“Let’s play at the Trojan War,” Anatole suggested, his eyes gleaming. “I’ll be the Greeks. You can be the Trojans.” Hippolyte smiled indulgently. A beat past, and Helene wanted to ask what about me? “Who should Lelya be?” he asked, as if picking up on his sister’s silence.

“You can be Helen,” Anatole said imperiously. “None of the girls do anything and if you’re one of the goddesses you’d just get in the way. And your name is close enough.”  
And so Hippolyte found two sticks that they could pretend were swords, and Anatole narrated how he would also be Menelaus and how Hippolyte should be Paris and take Helene away. He grabbed his sister’s hand and tucked his ‘sword’ into the sash around his waist. Hippolyte went to hide behind a trunk that became the city walls of Troy until Anatole yelled “go” and turned away so that he would notice as Paris walked across the room and picked Helene up, carrying her bridal-style back to Troy and setting her down on the floor behind its wall. Then Menelaus saw that she was gone and Achilles charged across to Ilium and Hector leapt from behind the wall to fight him, each drawing their swords and leaving Helen sitting cross-legged, her back to the city wall, watching a fly walk across the dusty and shadowed floor in front of her. She heard Anatole yell that something Hippolyte did was “Not fair, Polya!” and her older brother’s deeper voice laughing at him, then their wooden swords clash again. Eventually she peered over the trunk to see Hippolyte on the ground, his hands up in surrender and his lips parted in a chuckle as Anatole stood over him, vaunting, his sword pointed at his brother’s chest. He dropped the stick he had been carrying and walked over to Helene. “I’m Menelaus again,” he announced, before kissing her. “Come back to Sparta,” he commanded, and so she did, wiping her lips with her sleeve until they felt clean.

She felt Hippolyte’s eyes on her as Anatole lead her back to the center of the room, where he ordered Hippolyte to tell another story, a new one this time; and so he did, and so Helene listened and breathed in the dust circling through the air and watched the lantern’s shadows playing on the wall.

In a year, she would come out and feel even stranger eyes alighting upon every bare surface of her body, imagining it barer, and men would approach her father and barter for her, poetic types would tell her of the cities they would seige in her name; in another year, she would stop begging Hippolyte the university student to teach her Latin and Greek and instead turn to perfecting her French, she would stop borrowing his schoolbooks and instead teach herself how to read a room, a gesture, a tilt of the head; she would teach herself how to manipulate any conversation and how to turn men’s heads to her own cue, would learn to dominate talks of her future yet allow suitors to think that they could ever possess her. A few years of this later she would fail and the control she had thought she had would falter as her father hands her over to the newly-adorned Count Bezukhov behind her own back and she would come to see herself again as nothing more than the face that launched a thousand ships reborn and be brought back to this moment where she first filled that ancient woman’s footprints. But all this was to come: For now, she listened to her older brother fumble through a story that he wants her to think he knows, went back to stroking the younger one’s hair because despite it all he’s still Anatole and she couldn’t help but let him get away with it. For now she was free.


End file.
